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Central Ohio’s jobless rate is just about back to where it was before the Great Recession
started.

The rate for the Columbus area fell to 5 percent last month, down from 5.5 percent in February,
according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. That’s the lowest it has been since
May 2008, when the rate also was 5 percent.

The recession officially began in December 2007, but the unemployment rate in central Ohio —
which had averaged 4.7 percent for about two years — didn’t begin to spike until June 2008, when it
rose to 5.8 percent. The rate peaked at 9.7 percent in January 2010.

The March report for Ohio, released yesterday, “is actually pretty cheerful,” said Bill
LaFayette, owner of local economic consulting firm Regionomics.

Employers added 1,500 jobs in the region last month, and the number of unemployed workers fell
by 2,600, he said.

Employment has grown about 10 percent in central Ohio since January 2010, when the region
stopped shedding jobs, well above the 6 percent increase in the U.S. in that period, LaFayette
said.

The downside of the news is that the size of the labor force was about flat and hasn’t kept up
with the region’s growing population, he said.

“We’ve still got a lot of work to do to get disengaged people in the labor force,” he said.

The unemployment rate fell for all of Ohio’s 88 counties last month. Most counties typically see
a drop in the rate as the winter weather gives way to spring, but many counties now have rates that
are 1 to 2 percentage points below the rates of March 2013.

“Year over year for the last two or three years, the trend line has been job growth and falling
unemployment,” said Benjamin Johnson, a Job and Family Services spokesman.

In a couple of small counties, Noble County in eastern Ohio and Brown County in southern Ohio,
the unemployment rate dropped even more, falling 3.3 percentage points in Noble County and 3
percentage points in Brown County.

The main exception to the lower rates was in northeastern Ohio, where rates in the Cleveland
area were about the same as a year ago, and in Monroe County in eastern Ohio, which had a
state-high jobless rate of 12.5 percent in March, reflecting the closing last fall of the Ormet
aluminum plant.

The Columbus region had three of the eight counties in the state with unemployment rates at or
below 5 percent, led by Delaware County’s rate of 4.1 percent. Union County had a rate of 4.6
percent in March, and the unemployment rate for Columbus and Franklin County was 4.9 percent.

Mercer County in northwestern Ohio had the lowest unemployment rate in the state last month at
3.7 percent.

The results come after the state on Friday posted a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, which also
was the lowest rate in six years.

The state rate is adjusted to take into account seasonal variations while the county and metro
results released yesterday are not.

According to LaFayette’s seasonal adjustments, unemployment in the Columbus area was 4.8
percent, down from 5.1 percent in February.

Increases in government employment, leisure and hospitality and construction offset drops in
retail and business services, he said.